Since the discovery of high temperature superconductive materials in the late 1980's, there has been a desire to form such materials into wires or similar shapes. Ideally, such wires must be strong, flexible, highly conductive and able to withstand strong magnetic fields without loss of their current carrying capacity. Such properties have not yet been totally achieved, although current methods such as "powder in a tube" and "viscous suspension spinning" have achieved some success.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,983,576 issued to Hagino et al. describes the general process of fabricating superconductive wire by initially preparing a superconductive powder, filling a pipe or tube of silver with the superconductive powder, sealing the pipe or tube, subjecting the pipe or tube to drawing operations to form wire, and finally sintering the drawn wire. Additionally, they describe their improvement in such a process wherein the pipe or tube in which the superconductive powder is placed includes both a silver portion and a non-silver portion.
An object of this invention to provide a process for fabricating a clad superconductive body, e.g., a clad superconductive wire or tape.